If someone picks up a newspaper in China, there's a good chance it contains some government propaganda masquerading as news, according to a new study co-led by a University of Oregon expert.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32261670

If someone picks up a newspaper in China, there’s a good chance it contains some government propaganda masquerading as news, according to a new study co-led by a University of Oregon expert.

Hannah Waight, an assistant professor of sociology at the UO, and her collaborators found that the use of state-planted propaganda is on the rise in China. And it’s not just a tool for spreading ideological content. It’s also used to control and constrain other kinds of information beyond political ideals, including natural disaster and public health reporting in China, according to the researchers’ findings.

[…]

The researchers developed an approach that could identify instances where newspapers followed propaganda “scripts” from the government or were coerced into covering something in a specific way. The research team applied this formula to millions of newspaper articles over the course of the decade from 2012–22, which is aligned with President Xi Jinping’s authoritarian consolidation of power.

They validated their method by comparing their findings to leaked documents, which they obtained from China Digital Times, a U.S.-based nonprofit media organization. The leaked documents contained directives from the government about what newspapers should print. Their side-by-side analysis confirmed that their approach was accurately identifying propaganda.

[…]

Here is the study The decade-long growth of government-authored news media in China under Xi Jinping

TLDR:

  • Scripted propaganda -the coerced reprinting of lightly adapted government-authored articles in newspapers- is a daily phenomenon: on 90% of days from 2012 to 2022, the vast majority of Chinese Communist Party newspapers include at least some scripted propaganda at the direction of a central directive.

  • On particular sensitive days, the amount of scripted propaganda can spike to 30% of the articles appearing in major newspapers.

  • Scripted propaganda has strengthened under President Xi Jinping. In the last decade, the front page of party newspapers has evolved from 5% scripted articles to approximately 20% scripted.

  • The government-authored content throughout the paper is increasingly homogeneous—fewer and fewer adaptations are done by individual newspapers.

  • In contrast to popular speculation, we show that scripted content is not only on ideological topics (although it is increasingly ideological) and is also very prevalent in commercial papers. Using a case study of domestic coverage of COVID-19, we demonstrate how the regime uses scripting to shape, constrain, and delay information during crises.

[…]

  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.netEnglish
    8·
    9 hours ago

    Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French Revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible.

    In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.

    In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.

    The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.

    One section of the French Legitimists and “Young England” exhibited this spectacle.

    In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of society.

    For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeois amounts to this, that under the bourgeois régime a class is being developed which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society.

    What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.

    In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour, for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits. […]

    — Manifesto of the Communist Party chapter 3 (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848)

    With articles like these berating “Chinese state propaganda” at the same time as Sinclair Broadcast Group with its conservative “must-run” segments holds a monopoly on local news broadcasting in Seppoland, or this article accusing the Chinese state of “constraining and delaying” information on the COVID-19 pandemic when the Western press’ systemic and semi-deliberate fumbling of the pandemic leads most people in this part of the world to not even believe that the pandemic is ongoing, well… It rings of throwing stones in glass houses, doesn’t it? Of pots calling kettles black, of taking a mote out of a brother’s eye without first taking the beam out of one’s own; how many phrases exist to convey the idea of that good word hypocrisy.

    Articles like these are the projection of a moribund system’s beneficiaries — in the old days it was feudalism turning into capitalism, and at present it’s capitalism turning into socialism.

  • solo@slrpnk.netEnglish
    51·
    13 hours ago

    Yep, propaganda is a thing and it’s getting worst, but not only for state-controlled media. For example, Propaganda in the United States

    is spread by both government and non-government entities. Throughout its history, to the present day, the United States government has issued various forms of propaganda to both domestic and international audiences.

    Talking about international audiences, it looks like:

    Trump’s Gutting of RFA Hurts Press Freedom – And Helps Its Opponents – Across Asia | The Diplomat

    RFA and VOA had been the most accessible alternatives to state media for many people in countries like China and North Korea. Not anymore.